After a Decade, U.S.-Islamic Relations Take New Shape

By

Gerald F. Seib And

Bill Spindle

September 8, 2011

The Islamic world was but one item on the nation's foreign-policy agenda in early 2001. China had dominated the first days of the George W. Bush administration, particularly after a showdown over a downed U.S. jet.

In a flash, the 9/11 attacks put the Islamic world at the center of that agenda, where it has stayed ever since. America's shifting relationship with those communities has defined the past decade in foreign policy, evolving to upend U.S. views of friends and enemies and produce a new recipe for stability in the region.

Today, Afghanistan and Pakistan—both countries in the third tier of concerns before 9/11—sit at the center of American policy making. Iraq's Saddam Hussein went from nuisance to menace to memory. Yemen has steadily risen from second-rate problem to first-rate worry.

In the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. relationship with the Islamic world has undergone some profound changes. A more sophisticated view of the region has emerged that offers hope for improved relations, WSJ's Jerry Seib says, but also the possibility of missing some danger signs.

The U.S. government, too, has transformed itself. The intelligence community has tripled the number of members with Arab-language skills, including a 30-fold boost in those with knowledge of the multiple dialects spoken in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The State Department has added 500 Arabic speakers, doubling its total, and it also doubled the number of foreign-service officers in Muslim and Arab countries. A new intelligence unit collects information from a wide range of once overlooked publications, broadcast and Internet postings and trains analysts to sift through it all.

"Our understanding of Islam and Muslim communities has grown exponentially and is much more sophisticated now than it was on Sept. 11," says Juan Zarate, who was a national-security aide to Mr. Bush. "And that has enabled us to be much more nuanced in our dealings with the Muslim world."

Some analysts see a danger that the U.S., trusting it has developed a more sophisticated approach, might miss the signs of radical dangers lurking within the new groups and leaders it embraces. James Steinberg, until recently deputy secretary of state and now at Syracuse University, says that in dealing with Islamic groups, the U.S. needs to have "a clear understanding that these are important forces but that we can't be indifferent to the agendas."

Still, the perception has grown that radical Islam, while still a threat, has suffered real setbacks. The U.S. has avoided an attack similar in scope to that of 9/11, through a combination of better intelligence, improved law enforcement and a sea change in common attitudes and government policies toward violent Islamist groups in parts of the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.

After initially playing down—at times denying—the role of Saudi Arabian militants in the 9/11 attacks, Saudi officials by 2005 had launched their own crackdown on the branch of al Qaeda operating in the Arabian Peninsula, largely crippling the group and pushing its remnants across the border into Yemen.

In Iraq, many tribal groups that once welcomed violent radicals into their midst later turned and drove them out, with U.S. military backing, as part of the Awakening movements in Sunni Muslim areas such as Anbar province. Their efforts helped the country step back from the precipice of a civil war.

"9/11 forced people to make a stand and say whether they were for violence or not," says Shadi Hamid, an analyst with the Brookings Doha Institute in Qatar.

ENLARGE

Muslim men prayed during the first night of Ramadan at a mosque in New York last year. Interest in the Islamic world among U.S. policy makers and students has surged since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mustafah Abdulaziz for the Wall Street Journal

A Decade After 9/11

Meanwhile, more practical, mainstream expressions of Islamist politics have stolen the spotlight. Over the past decade, for instance, Turkey's AKP party has built itself into a political juggernaut by mixing Islamist-tinged social policies with a business-friendly ethos and Western-friendly foreign policy.

Since the Arab Spring, the U.S. no longer sees autocratic and secular leaders—like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh—as bulwarks against radical Islamists but as threats to stability.

U.S. diplomats increasingly aim to differentiate between extreme and benign Islamic forces in the region, and they're embracing the latter as part of the solution to the threat from radical Islam. The American military now seeks to negotiate with the "good" elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The U.S. has accepted the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role in a new Egyptian government and has opened up new channels of communication with the group.

Gen. James Jones, former national security adviser in the Obama White House, said that one of the reasons for success on that front has been a significant increase in the flow of intelligence to and from friendly nations, including those in the Islamic world.

"I have the strong feeling that we are at least keeping up with the significant radical organizations like al Qaeda," he says. "We've generally been able to track them from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region to Yemen to Somalia to the Maghreb. Just this year, I'm quite sure that we prevented or deterred some significant terrorist activity in Europe as a result of our ability to not only rapidly process intelligence but to share it with our allies."

Equally important has been blunting the appeal of al Qaeda in the streets of Islamic nations. Mr. Zarate, the former Bush administration aide, says the American effort began with an overly simplistic approach to public diplomacy aimed at "trying to drive people to like us more," but evolved more to using U.S. rhetoric and messaging to paint al Qaeda as an illegitimate force bent on "hijacking" the Islamic faith.

While American standing in the Muslim world has plummeted to all-time lows, al Qaeda's standing has dropped even more precipitously, especially in countries with first-hand experience in violent Islamic militants killing their countrymen and women.

In polling conducted by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center between 2008 and 2010, the citizenry of Middle Eastern countries expressed some of the lowest tolerance for individual violence against civilians of any nations in the world. Two percent of Egyptians, for example, said individual attacks on civilians were "sometimes justified," compared with 5% of Germans, 15% of British and 22% of Americans. Seven percent of Iraqis and 9% of Jordanians said individual attacks were sometimes justified.

"Al Qaeda has been very effective at discrediting al Qaeda," says Dalia Mogahed, director of the center. "Terrorism has been its own worst enemy."

A decade after 9/11, interest in the Islamic world, and especially its Arab component, runs deep. In the 2000-01 school year, there were 889 U.S. students who studied abroad in Arabic-speaking countries for academic credit at their U.S. colleges and universities, according to statistics from the Institute of International Education.

By 2008-09, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the number had risen fivefold, to 4,485.

That rush has some now talking of an overreaction. "We may look back decades from now," says Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "and say that 9/11 has led to the training of too many Arab world/Middle East experts and too few China experts."

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